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Ground Work and Valley-Drop Takedown (video)

On 10 Aug, 2011By Iain Abernethy

This video was filmed at one of my regular karate classes last week. We started by working on a number of ways of moving an opponent who is on all fours (drawn from my Judo training with Mike Liptrot). I class these methods as “fighting” or “game play” techniques as they would not be appropriate for self-protection. The reason being that deliberately keeping a fight on the floor would leave you extremely venerable to any third parties and prevent you from escaping.

For self-protection there is no need to do any of these techniques from the position shown as standing up and escaping would be the smart thing to do as opposed to pursuing a fight on the floor. That said, it should be acknowledged that the marital arts have many facets and the study of “fighting” can be enjoyable and worthwhile in itself quite apart from any self-protection considerations. In our dojo we are careful not to mix contexts and we do enjoy this kind of practise for its own sake.

After we had worked on the techniques from the kneeling position shown in the video, we grappled, worked the pads and did some bunkai training. The second part of the video rejoins the class when we were looking at the “valley-drop” takedown into ground work. Again, this technique is most definitely a “fighting method” and would be unsuitable for self-protection for the reasons explained above.

In Karate-Do Kyohan, Gichin Funakoshi shows his “nine throws” one of which is the “valley drop” throw. Funakoshi’s valley drop throw is what most would call a “one armed shoulder throw” and is not the valley drop found in other systems. In this video we look at the “common valley drop” and not Funakoshi’s.